the birthday of thomas subtitled comedy of errors

yesterday was (as he likes to call it) the day of st thomas the divine and since shaks and i couldnt go to gold reef city with them (i still haven't been it's an abomination really) we decided to go out for a celebratory drink after work.

we were driving merrily along (really merrily... we were singing 'funky town' by lipps inc which is the ultimate cheerily cheery song) when all of a sudden (!) out of nowhere (!) WHAM the road gave way into a huge gaping hole (of doom!). thomas swerved around it to avoid our certain untimely deaths. we shuddered to a stop on a grate and all hopped out of the car to gather around the car and look at it, as one is want to do in that situation since sitting in the back seat continuing to sing 'funky town' probably wouldn't fix the tyre.

the tyre was popped. completely. flat flat flat. i have never seen a proper flat tyre in real life (my 22 years on this earth have seemingly been truly secluded). i was thus impressed with the level of flatness. mikey and tom, adopting impressive levels of masculinity, propped the car up on tom's little jack and began using other tools to do other things. the jack collapsed. under the car for absolutely no reason! malice of the jack. so Shaks and i ran across the road to the garage aka service station (where we wanted to buy chocolate milkshake) but instead went about finding help. we found a man called gift who informed us that the garage did not have a jack (!) and that we would have to ask someone for help.

i made a beehive (hahahahaaa shaks will get this inside joke) for a man who had just innocently parked his car and was going to the shop.

"hello," i said, "do you have a jack?"
"yes," he said

and so he followed us to the scene of the breakdown where mike and tom gasped at the beauty of angelo's jack (apparently it was a beautiful specimen.) and they proceeded, with gift from the engen garage to change the tyre. just as we managed to screw in 2 of the 6 bolts with the spanner (or as tommy calls it, a screw tightener), gift dropped the spanner into the grate. we tried, as in the movies, to lift the grate and then to pick up the spanner using a twisted piece of wire , but neither worked.

we had nothing left to do but to run into the road and flag down another audi who duly did a u turn and came with their spanner and we managed to fix everything.

i am happy because we met such lovely people last night - angelo, the audi people, gift, the man who lived in the house next to the hole and other people (whom i christened marty and allan) who stopped to ask if we were ok.

and like i said, we got the easy version of a breakdown. we stopped across the road from a garage,we had a spare tyre, we had gift, we had cell phones with signal and we were together with angelo who was an engineer. we could have been on a dirt farm road with no cell phone battery, no tyre and scary creatures howling into the moonlight. it was like the time sarah c and i broke down and we were sad until we realised we had broken down in the parking lot of sandton and we went to have coffee until we were rescued

... i REALLY need to learn how to change a tyre (ok ok i need to learn how to DRIVE but its all the same really)